Github user markhamstra commented on the pull request:
https://github.com/apache/incubator-spark/pull/402#issuecomment-35061086
It's what I'd be inclined to do.
I think there is a need for something with a higher-level of abstraction
than mapPartitions/mapPartitionsWithIndex that avoids the boilerplate and
potential pitfalls when the need is to create some per-partition resource and
then clean those up when they are no longer needed; but the *With functions
neither meet that entire need nor do they do what they do in a way that is
significantly easier to code than using mapPartitions/mapPartitionsWithIndex
directly.
Deprecate these and perhaps add a better attempt in 1.1+.0.
